Georgia and Utah, as well as hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, have some work to do on their plans to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act, according letters published this week by the U.S. Department of Education. Each turned in its ESSA plan back in September. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team are just beginning to respond to state plans. (Maryland is the only other state that submitted this fall to receive feedback.)

Here's a quick look at some of the issues the department sited in each plan. Click on the state name to read the full letter from the feds.

GeorgiaGeorgia has proposed looking at whether schools are able to close achievement gaps as part of its academic achievement indicator. The department says that gap-closing can't be used there, although it can figure in elsewhere in the state's accountability system. The Peach State has listed nine indicators of school quality or student success, but it hasn't sufficiently explained how they would be measured, or how they will differentiate among schools, the department says. Georgia needs to do a better job of explaining how much weight it is giving to different accountability indicators. ESSA says academic factors, like test scores, need to count for more than school quality indicators, like school climate.

It's not clear Georgia met that requirement, the feds say. The state needs to provide more information to show that its plans for identifying low-performing schools and schools where certain groups of students are struggling meet ESSA's requirements. And it needs to explain how it will ensure poor students get their fair share of effective teachers, the department says. The department isn't sure Georgia is following ESSA's rules for making sure at least 95 percent of students participate in standardized testing.

UtahThe department says Utah needs to spell out its long-term goals for math and reading, and for English-language learners to attain proficiency. The feds want Utah to make it clear whether it is using the ACT or some other assessment as its test for high school students. Utah is allowing its local districts to come up with their own factors to measure school quality or student success. If those factors are used in state accountability determinations, the department is worried not every school will be held accountable for the same indicators. It is unclear whether graduation rates, English-language proficiency, and test scores make up at least half of a school's overall rating in Utah's system, as required by ESSA, the department says.

Puerto RicoPuerto Rico needs to better explain how it is identifying so-called "targeted support" schools that might be doing well overall, but where particular groups of students are struggling, the department says. Puerto Rico needs to better spell out how it will make sure poor kids get their fair share of effective teachers, according to the feds. Puerto Rico is using teacher attendance as its indicator of school quality and student success but needs to better explain how that will be measured, the department says. The department isn't sure Puerto Rico is following ESSA's rules for making sure at least 95 percent of students participate in standardized testing.

Do states have to revise their plans based on the federal feedback?That's unclear. States that submitted their plans this spring got the federal seal of approval even if they didn't change things the department asked them to change. For instance, Tennessee still has so-called "super subgroups," which combine different groups of students for accountability purposes, even though the feds have said that's a no-no.

These are too good not to post! Happy Holidays!

Research shows that less than 3% of people write down their goals. Most people are statistically more likely to spend time organizing exactly what they want from the supermarket than they are working out what they want from life. Crazy but true.

One way, most successful people would say the best way, to get more out of life is to develop meaningful personal and professional goals. The biggest predictor of success is purposeful direction. If you don’t have something to aim for in life, the chances are you will end up achieving far less than you would like. Almost every successful person in the world started with a clearly defined goal and a plan to achieve it.

The beauty of setting goals is that they actually help to streamline your life, adding focus and something tangible for you to work towards while shedding unproductive low yield activities. In some ways goals are like guideposts helping you to move towards a meaningful life, towards something that holds special importance to you. What that special something is, is a very individual choice.

The first step to working out what you want is to establish what is important to you in life. If for example, you value your friends and family above anything else, then it makes sense to set a life goal of spending as much quality time with them as possible.Consider answering the questions below and start devising goals around the answers you produce:* What would you want to achieve if you knew you could not fail?* What is the legacy you most want to leave behind?* What and who exactly are you when you’re at your absolute best?* If today was your last day on earth how would you spend it? * Who would you spend it with?

Your answers to these questions will provide you with valuable insights about what is truly important to you in your life and help you jump start your goal setting process. Put yourself in in that 3% and you’ll have a chance to make 2018, and all your years to come, the very best years of your life!

Early in my career, I had a GREAT boss, Gary, who had hand-selected and developed a team of rock star leaders. It’s arguably the best corporate team I’ve ever worked on. I’m not sure how he pulled this off, but nearly every member of the team was a Box 9 succession planning candidate. He was all about developing our leadership and visioning skills, and spent many hours with us debriefing our strategies and making plans.

At one point he told us our team was “an experiment.” He claimed he “was in cahoots with HR” (you’ve got to add his deep Southern accent when you say this for full effect) to build an “All-Star Team” and then challenge them to truly collaborate and see what was possible.

Gary tragically passed away years ago, so I can’t verify whether the “experiment” was real. But whatever he did worked. It was not without turmoil, but at the end of the day, we developed a deep respect for one another, blew away results, most of us ended up in senior-level roles in a few years.

AND THEN: He Challenged Us to Be FollowersI’ll never forget the day the union went on strike. Gary pulled his cahoot experiment team into a conference room and warned us:

Here’s the deal. Each of you are going to spend the foreseeable future doing union jobs, climbing poles, driving forklifts, answering phones. Sometimes these situations can become dangerous–the union is not happy. There are a lot of smart people who have been working for months on how we should respond to this. We can’t explain it all. So for now, I don’t want you to be leaders. Until this strike is over, we don’t need your vision, we need you to step up and be the very best followers you can be.

You can learn a lot about leadership when you concentrate on improving your following skills.My friend, a retired Baltimore City Battalion chief goes to a similar place whenever we talk about growing leaders.

Karin, yes, we need great leaders. But when the building is on fire or the drug raid is underway, you don’t need 12 great leaders. You need one solid leader and 11 highly skilled followers executing the plan.

Five Critical Follower Behaviors to Train, Develop and EncourageFollowing is an undervalued competency. We seldom train or recruit for it. And yet, there is huge ROI in training key following and collaboration skills.If you’re an individual contributor looking to rock your role, or you’re a manager working to get your A team to A+, work to build and reinforce these five critical behaviors.

Holding Tough Conversations: Oh, it’s hard to have a tough conversation when you’re the boss, but exponentially harder when you have no power. Equip your team with the same skills you develop in your managers for giving and receiving effective feedback. I.N.S.P.I.R.E. great communication up, down and sideways.

Thinking Critically: The last thing you want your followers doing is following your stupid mistakes. Train your team how to evaluate nuanced circumstances, ask the right questions, and make the right call.

Managing Time: Your team is a whirlwind of urgent requests from you, from your customers, and a bunch of crap you may not even fully understand. Help them identify the MIT (Most Important Thing) priorities and behaviors and build a system for managing their day.

Connecting What to Why: We teach this to leaders all the time. But it works even better when you can get the whole team thinking this way. Why are we asking our customers to do this? Why am I performing this task this way? Why are we doing this thing no wants to do? Building a deeper connection between what your team is doing it to the deeper why.

Building Trusted Peer Relationships: In a stack-ranked world, with limited resources creating trusted peer relationships is a fine art. Your team needs tools and practice–and support from you to reach out and build relationships even with the most frustrating folks in other departments.

This year, what will you do to build followership competence on your team?

When it is time for teachers to be observed and evaluated far more than the teacher's performance is under consideration. The observing and evaluating leader has to consider the scope of their own knowledge about what they are observing. Aside from understanding and using the evaluation tool, the observer has to know how to ask open and honest questions, reflect on the answers and offer targeted feedback that aims to improve a practice of the teacher. What further influences the processes are the circumstances that few discuss and yet are at play.

Teacher Morale is a ConcernSchools are in a precarious position when it comes to hiring and retaining teachers. In some geographic areas around the country it is extremely difficult to find new teachers. So in the back of a leader's mind there lingers a concern that, if a teacher receives a less than stellar evaluation, morale can be diminished or worse, they may choose to leave. Morale is important in a learning environment and there is much that contributes to its becoming diminished including public opinion, continuing disrespect for the profession, criticism of the lack of progress and regulations that sometimes are felt as weighty burdens.Avoiding courageous conversations is never the antidote for slipping morale. The rubrics that were designed to express the standards that teachers must meet are comprehensive. They are well-rounded, inclusive tools. However, using all of the dimensions, each indicator, or whatever the rubric calls its descriptors, to capture a snapshot in time is truly a challenge.. It takes skill and willingness to successfully engage the teacher in a reflective dialogue about what is done well and how student success can improve if certain teaching behaviors change.Change is difficult and most humans hold fast to behaviors and patterns. Educators are no different. So the leadership challenge is to understand the tool being used and more than that, to nurture an environment in which the process of observing and evaluating can be spacious enough to include risk taking, honest conversation, and a cultural value for improving practice on behalf of student learning. An ExampleThings are not always as they seem. An observer can note that a teacher speaks too quickly, doesn't wait long enough after asking a question, and has their back to the class often as they work on the black or whiteboards. Two types of feedback can follow. The quick one raises the three issues as in need of correction. That is the morale trouncing type. The other takes more time from the observer. Reflection and thought about what the source of these behaviors might be. That wondering can open a healthy dialogue between the observer and the observed. And a video can help. Watching one's self and doing so with another who is invested in the improvement of your practice is extremely effective. It will be beneficial to the process when videoing the lesson becomes a common practice.The Power of Good Questions and Courageous ConversationsAbsent video, the next available transaction is an observer with the ability to ask questions that contribute to the already established atmosphere of trust in which the effort to improve is a shared value. Questions about the choices made, in this example, about reasons behind choices about teacher talk, wait time, and where the teacher faces can uncover answers that the observer may have no idea about until her questions are answered. Or it can awaken awareness in the teacher about considering the manner in which they act in relationship to their learners.In the EndAvoiding honest engagement with teachers about their practice, even in an attempt to protect fragile morale, is never the best answer. Yet, it is no small task for a leader to develop the knowledge, skill, and ability to manage the weight of the observation tools while nurturing a healthy learning environment where everyone is growing and students succeed.Knowing what will make a difference and how to encourage others to engage in the change process is the leaders' responsibility. Side stepping that responsibility in order to maintain the status quo or avoiding a conflict or a downward slide in morale ends with an observation and evaluation process that takes untold hours for no purpose other than accountability. Doing it to improve student achievement in a culture of active learners, children and adults, where encouragement and support are the partners of observation and evaluation, can make the time spent well worth it.Ann Myers and Jill Berkowicz are the authors of The STEM Shift (2015, Corwin) a book about leading the shift into 21st century schools. Connect with Ann and Jill on Twitter or Email.

IDEA Part B Confidentiality Checklist - 6-page document that is designed to help state and local agencies in identifying actions, policies and procedures to meet confidentiality provisions in IDEA Part B.

Supporting Students who Struggle in Math - flier about trainings for teachers to be held in January

New Alternate Extended Core SEED Standards for Grades 6-8 - 17-slide explanation of the draft; feedback survey needs to be completed by Jan. 30 if you want to provide input.

Nate Dearden (USBE SpEd attorney) has a PPT on emails and student privacy. I think we need to look at created school-wide procedures to address that information contained in the ppt.

As a special education team we have added the a “redacted” statement to our emails signatures and requested that our sped teachers implement as well. This is a new process for our special education teachers and we are still reminding, but I think it would be a good thing to address as a school since a majority of our communication is written via email and IM.

Also we need to ensure that if we are using any other communication options that we do not discuss students specifically as those can then be opened to being subpoenaed if we are ever in a Due Process situation.

Redacting an EmailI had a few questions arise in regards to what wording you would need to use when redacting an email. I created an email signature that I could easily change out as needed with an italicized statement regarding redacted information. You are welcome to copy it if you would like. (see signature below). You may also want to copy the disclaimer at the bottom of my signature as well. If you don’t know how to do a signature line please see the screen shots. Signature icon can be accessed on a new email.

This is directly for the USBE Special Education. Since this specifically address the use of email responses with student information, please take the time to review and implement the information below. Remember as a team we specifically utilize first initial and last name or just first initial. If parents are using first names and the email references the last name you must redact the name by replacing it with just an initial or using “student.”

EMAIL AND STUDENT PRIVACY Introduction to FERPA The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that prohibits the improper disclosure of personally identifiable information derived from education records. FERPA requires schools to provide certain privacy protections for education records that they maintain. Additionally, FERPA affords parents and adult students certain rights with respect to student education records, including:

The right to inspect and review student education records;

The right to request an amendment of student education records;

The right to provide written consent before the LEA discloses personally identifiable information (PII) from the student’s education records, except for certain exceptions specified in FERPA; and,

The right to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education concerning an LEA’s alleged failure to comply with FERPA.

Other information that, alone or in combination, is linked or linkable to a specific student that would allow a reasonable person in the school community to identify the student with a reasonable certainty.

The Family Policy Compliance Office (FPCO) has held that student ID numbers and social security numbers constitute personally identifiable information since they are “easily traceable” to the student. Letter to Shea, 36 IDELR 7 (FPCO 2001).

Email Transmission of PII Due to the rapidly evolving use of digital communication and record keeping, traditional FERPA rules and regulations offer little guidance in regards to electronic communications. Some hearing officers or courts have taken the position that emails that are not maintained as part of the student’s records are not FERPA records. However, given the fact that emails are frequently used as evidence in due process hearings and State complaint investigations, school staff should exercise caution in documenting student concerns in email communications.Regardless of whether email communications qualify as “education records” under FERPA, unencrypted email is not a secure method for transmitting confidential information or sensitive data over the internet. Anytime FERPA protected information is emailed, there is a risk that it could be accessed by unintended recipients. As such, USBE policy prohibits LEAs from transmitting PII over email.

Responding to Messages Containing PII Many parents may share their concerns about their student’s special education services via email to school staff. In these instances, school staff must redact any PII from the email prior to responding to the parent or forwarding the email. For example, in instances where a student’s name is used, school staff should delete the student’s name from the message and replace it with a generic term (e.g., “student” or [Student]) or use some other indicator such as a highlight or symbol to indicate where the redaction occurred. In the subsequent message, school staff should include a short statement to the email recipient indicating that PII within the email has been redacted in compliance with FERPA and USBE policies to avoid the unsecure transmission of student sensitive information. The USBE follows this same procedure whenever school staff or parents send an email containing PII to USBE staff.

Best Practices for Avoiding Inadvertent Disclosure Before sending any email communication about a student with a parent, administrator, or colleague, school staff should carefully consider whether that information could be shared in another way. Staff members should avoid the use of email for documenting substantive matters and concerns. If an email is intended to document a substantive matter or concern, it should be printed and included in the student’s file.If communication about a student must be sent over email, school staff should:

In the rare circumstance when school staff determine that PII must be transmitted over email, the information should be in a protected file attachment, not in the body of the email, followed by a separate email containing a strong password to access the file.

We welcome today's guest blogger, Jennifer Cleary*, a former teacher who now works as a content developer and faculty consultant.

Like many new teachers, my first year in the classroom was filled with grand visions of saving the world, one kindergartener at a time. That first year started well - I was assigned an amazing mentor who was there when I couldn't find little Dennis, or when little Julia appeared in my class and had never been there before. I spent two full days in my mentor's classroom watching her teach, which was an incredible experience, if not a little overwhelming.

The sense of being overwhelmed grew when the professional development kicked in. At least once a month, I was in full-day training - classroom management, standards, homework, manipulatives, assessment, reading and math centers.

For each of these trainings, I spent hours creating precise sub plans, special notes to the sub, and transportation lists; not to mention the cleanup the following day. On weeks without formal training, my school required all newly-hired teachers to participate in two-hour book studies that included outside assignments. Between all this work, I still had to teach, and plan, and assess, and grade papers.

One day I asked a small group of veteran peers, "When does this get easier?" Their response was a surprise and a shock - "It doesn't get easier." "There is never enough time, no matter how good you get."Burnout Among New TeachersMy experience is not a unique experience. Across the industry, educators are concerned about teacher burnout, especially among first-year teachers. Contributing factors to this growing sentiment include a lack of appropriate teaching materials, professional development, and preparation time. Compounding these perceptions are policies like evaluation of teachers based on student test scores and merit pay.

For many, the mental image of teacher burnout is a teacher who has spent 30 years in a classroom, working tirelessly to make the most out of every student. The less common image is the new teacher.According to the NEA, 20 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first three years. In urban settings, 50 percent leave within their first five years. When surveyed, these new teachers cited lack of support as the number one reason for their decisions.

Burnout Can Be ContagiousThe simple solution to new teacher burnout is to provide mentors. But, according to Harry Wong, this is not enough, especially if mentors experience their own burnout. Teacher burnout among mentors can be easily transmitted to the very teachers they are seeking to support.

A new study from Michigan State University (MSU) discovered a remarkable link between burnout of new teachers and a school-wide culture of burnout coupled with burnout among their closest circle of colleagues. "If you are surrounded by people who are downcast or walk around under a pall of burnout, then it has a high chance of spilling over, even if you don't have direct contact with these folks," said the study.

With our newest teachers lacking support while working in a contagious environment, our treatment must be two-fold. New teachers should be treated with an immunization of support, and the whole school should receive an antidote.

New Teacher ImmunizationNew teachers face their own unique challenges as they adjust to working full-time and meeting new teacher expectations. To accommodate these challenges, a comprehensive, coherent, and sustained induction program will have a far greater impact on new teachers.

An induction program should focus on differentiated research-based instructional strategies to provide focus for both the new teacher and the mentor. As they navigate that challenging first-year, both should work together toward common, defined outcomes. Increased focus is often an antidote to chaos. Personally, I would have welcomed a less chaotic and overwhelming first-year experience.

A vital factor for new teacher induction is balancing the cognitive load. An induction program should be planned with strong consideration given to the everyday challenges new teachers face. Doing so will produce an effective induction program that becomes the best immunization for early burnout, no matter how close the contact with burnout carriers.

School-Wide AntidoteInstructional strategies are also an ideal place to treat teacher burnout. By adopting instructional strategies that grant students ownership of their own learning, teachers will become facilitators of complex tasks instead of distributors of content. This tactic reduces the overload and provides an initial antidote for burnout. Student achievement will organically improve as teachers apply the strategies and techniques to implement this shift, providing the booster shot to further alleviate the burnout.

Burnout is a real issue, for both first-year teachers and thirty-year veterans. Schools are losing valuable educators, and student achievement is suffering. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are treatments available to immunize new teachers from experiencing the detrimental side effects of burnout, and there are treatments to provide school-wide antidotes.

Kim, J., Youngs, P., & Frank, K. (2017). Burnout contagion: Is it due to early career teachers' social networks or organizational exposure? Teaching and Teacher Education, 66, 250-260.

*Jennifer Cleary is a former teacher and currently is a content developer and faculty consultant for Learning Sciences International. She is a co-author of the forthcoming book, Classroom Techniques for Creating Conditions for Rigorous Instruction (LSI Publishing: 2017), along with Robert Marzano and Terry Morgan. At LearningSciences.com, leaders at every level can find supportive resources to develop instructional leadership, growth-oriented evaluation practices, and sustainable success.

The shoulder-shrugging reply "whatever" continues to annoy Americans more than other words or phrases, but "fake news" is coming on strong.The annual Marist College poll of most annoying words and phrases found "whatever" topping the list for the ninth straight year. It was the pick of one third of poll respondents, who were given five choices.The recent addition "fake news" was slightly ahead of "no offense, but" for second place. About one in 10 found "literally" to be most grating, as did a similar number for "you know what I mean."